by Ralph Dennis
“Thank you, ma’am.” Netta waited for me at the door. She swung it open. I gave her a suggestion of a bow and a right-eyed wink on the way past.
I crossed the parking lot of the Peachtree Hills Liquor Store and placed the bagged bottle in the seat between Hump and me. It was the green bottle of Courvoisier and it had, at the cash register, done bad damage to a twenty and a ten.
“Write in the expense book,” I said. “Cognac for Art Maloney at $28.79.”
“After that … do I put down bribe?”
“A curious idea,” I said.
We had an hour to waste. Hump slumped in the easy chair and sucked at a beer bottle. I looked up Green Brothers in the white pages and copied the address on Marietta Street. Below that, I wrote down the address on Meadow Way and the Butler name.
I had the green bottle on the coffee table when Art arrived. I’d left the price tag on. He dropped his coat on the sofa and grinned at me with that big round Irish face of it. He picked up the bottle and, with a thumbnail, peeled away the price tag and dropped it in the ashtray. “Leaving price tags on, that’s not very polite.”
“Missed that,” I said. “Crack any big cases today?”
“Funny you should ask that.” He turned away and placed the bottle on top of his coat. “The answer is no.”
“No?”
“Not when I left this morning. But it was rocking around the edges. Shorty and Curly were howling for their lawyers.”
“You talk to them?”
He nodded. “Until the day shift came on. A lot of I don’t knows and I don’t remembers bouncing off those walls.”
“You get a feeling?”
“Nothing I can make a charge on,” Art said. “But they know more about Culp than they’re telling.”
“If you talk to them this evening …?”
“Yeah?”
“See if they know anything about a young blond girl named Billie Joe, who might have been with Culp a time or two.”
“Another favor, huh?”
Hump grinned. “You ought to see the lady talked him into it.”
“Since when did Jim need talking into something that had money in it?”
“Changed my morals,” I said. “I’m twice-born, twice-born.”
“And ready to testify now?”
We laughed. I’d told him about that years ago and he still remembered. That was the religious con they pulled on soldiers and sailors out in California. It was during the Korean one and I’d been in transit. It would happen a day or two before the payday. Nobody’d have a dime. The notice would go up on the board. WANTED TWENTY SERVICEMEN TO GO TO A PARTY. You’d get there and it would be cookies and punch in the rec room of some church. There’d be some pretty girls who’d play Ping-pong with you and then you’d notice everybody drifting toward the chapel and you’d get herded that way too. And, suddenly, those pretty girls would get up and testify about what the Lord had done for them. Then they’d sit down, pleased with themselves, and stare at you. Now it’s your turn, they’d seem to be saying.
“Billie Joe?” Art got out his notepad and wrote the name down.
“That’s right.”
He closed the book. “If I can fit it into the conversation.” He stood and picked up the green bottle and his coat. “I’ll leave now if there’s nothing else you want me to do for you.”
“Now that you ask.” I passed him the paper with the Green Brothers and Wallace James and the address on Meadow Way on it. “On your way home, you might stop by the Green Brothers and find out if they’ve got an address on this James dude. Might be, after he sold the house to the Butlers, he moved to the country and took up farming.”
Art stared at the Green Brothers address. “Marietta Street is not on my way home.”
“Might be you can crack another case,” I said.
“Oh, shit.” Art lifted the bottle and looked at it. “If I had any sense, I’d pour this down your drain and forget the whole thing.”
“Don’t do that. That stuff is sixteen or seventeen years old. My drain’s not used to that kind of quality.”
“Which case is this?”
“The woman killed at the 7–11 Wednesday night.”
“Ellison’s working on that one,” Art said.
“He doesn’t love me like you do.”
“And you can’t follow this out yourself?”
I shook my head. I didn’t have to say it. He knew my scams. That insurance agent thing would work with some old lady. Green Brothers might call the local office and check on me.
Art struggled into his topcoat. “I’ll see.”
“That means a maybe?”
“That means I’ll head in the direction of downtown and see if I get there. That’s no promise.”
It was as much as I could hope for. I let it go.
After Art left, Hump said, “You’re getting your money’s worth on that bottle.”
That was true enough. But it was a damned good bottle of cognac.
The wait was a red hair short of an hour. I made it to the phone on the second ring.
“This pays off the whole bottle of brandy?”
I said that it did.
“At the closing, Wallace James gave Green Brothers an address in Plainsville. Broad Street 455. That what you want?”
“Kiss, kiss and thank you, Art.”
“Tomorrow’s a Sunday, a day of rest. Don’t call me.”
“What if the bikers know something about Billie Joe?”
“I’ll call you.”
He hung up. I got the white pages and dialed the Riviera and asked for Rosemary’s room. When she came on the line, I offered her a Sunday drive into the country.
She accepted.
CHAPTER SEVEN
It was a cold, bright Sunday morning.
I’d said I’d pick up Rosemary at ten and I was there on time. I might have been early if I’d forgotten a promise I’d made the night before. That I’d rake out the old Ford. It took about ten minutes. Beer cans and bottles, those plastic glasses some of the bars use, cigarette packs, parts of newspapers, Braves, Hawks and Falcon programs, some green chicken bones … and a lot more. The lot more was dirt and dust mainly.
Rosemary waited for me in the Riviera lobby. She was wearing a green and brown tweed pants suit. When I approached her with the idea of helping her with her coat, she smiled and shook her head. She unfolded a black serape with some kind of Indian design on it and slipped her head through the yoke.
Her smile had some imp in it. “Do I look like a hippie, James?”
“Call me Jim.” I took her elbow and turned her toward the main entrance. “If you look like a hippie, you’ll give them a good name.”
We were a few miles from the motel, heading toward Buckhead, when the Coors can rolled from under the front seat and stopped at the toe of her right boot. She leaned over and picked it up.
I remembered. That went back to the previous spring. A newspaperman I knew and his wife had driven to Oklahoma to visit her family and they’d brought me back a case.
“Somebody must have tossed it through my window,” I said.
She placed it on the seat next to her bag. “Of course, Jim.”
It was an hour’s drive through the winter landscape. I liked it. I felt myself bubbling away. It wasn’t just that Rosemary was with me. It’s the way my head is put on backward. I like the gray, the bareness, the dormant things. All the promises that spring is making from underground. And, I think, I’m disappointed when the green rush comes.
Plainsville is on the edge of the soybean country. The market for soybeans in the last few years has meant a lot to the farmers. It’s close to a constant in the changing farm market. I suspect all the farmers in the area begin grace by saying, “Thank the Lord for soy sauce and bean curd.”
The town doesn’t show any sign of the new money. The two-block main street is chipping, flaking and rotting from the outside. What’s there is a parody of the southern small town. There are a co
uple of seed and feed stores, a hardware store, a Woolworth’s, a supermarket and a movie theater. The movie house is showing one of those made-in-Georgia films. The low-budget ones with lots of car racing and moonshine making and nubile girls wearing costumes that look like they were pirated out of a comic script. The film listed at the Lyric, as we drive by, is White Whiskey Run, starring nobody at all.
And there’s an old hotel that might have been fancy back in the 1930s. Half of it has been painted an off white and the other half has been scraped and wire brushed. There’s an A-frame sign on the lawn in front. NOW SERVING LUNCH.
I waved at the sign. “Lunch later?”
Rosemary leaned past me to look at the hotel. “Fried chicken, baking powder biscuits and greens?”
“And country ham, sweet potatoes, string beans and apple pie and ice cream for dessert.”
“You make it sound good.” She leaned away, settling into her seat once more.
“And don’t forget cornbread and spoonbread and buttermilk and iced tea.”
“I accept the invitation,” she said.
“Lunch is on me, the Rolaids are on you.”
After the two-block main street, the car dealerships and the heavy-machinery franchises flanked both sides of the road.
The house was squat, one floored, built out of cinderblock and trimmed with red brick. Except for the picture window off to the right and the brick trim, it might have been a World War Two pillbox. There were pyracantha bushes crowding the house, below the picture window and along the small porch. The red berries gave the yard the only color it had.
I parked out front and gave the numbers on the mailbox next to the street a check. It matched. It was the right one. I waited, giving Rosemary some time. After a minute or so, when she didn’t move, I said, “You nervous?”
“I guess I am.”
“You can wait in the car if you want to.”
“No, I’m not nervous for the reason you think. That’s done. It was over years ago.”
I nodded and got out and walked around and opened the door for her. The wind was strong and there was the scent of ice in it. She took her time. She removed the serape and folded it and placed it on the car seat before I closed the door. As we went up the walk, I watched her smooth her hair.
I reached the porch before the thought occurred to me. It was church time. There was always the chance that Wallace James was already in his pew, settling in for his morning nap.
I pressed the doorbell anyway.
A man opened the door and peered out at us. I put his age a few years past forty. He wore a gray sweater over a blue flannel shirt. He was thin and stoop-shouldered. His hair was cut skin tight, what we used to call an onion-peeling, and it was mainly gray with a sprinkling of the original black.
“Yes?”
I turned slightly and looked at Rosemary. I wanted to see how she reacted. Her face didn’t show anything and there was no recognition on the man’s face. “I’d like to see Wallace James if he’s here.”
“He don’t live here.”
“This is the address I was given,” I said.
“Is it business?”
“Not exactly,” I said. “We’re from Atlanta.”
“He don’t have office hours on Sunday,” the man said. “Weekdays you can see him at the Forrest Building on Main Street.”
His eyes had shifted from me. He was looking at Rosemary.
Rosemary stepped closer to the door. “I’m Rosemary Atkinson. I knew Wallace … Buddy … a long time ago.”
“You’re that woman, the one from South Carolina?”
“Yes, I am.” It was hard for the words to come out. There was a harshness in his voice that must have disturbed her. That woman.
“Then I guess you’re here about the girl, about Billie Joe.”
“Yes.”
I put a hand on the doorframe and leaned between them. “Billie Joe in town now?”
“You Mr. Atkinson?”
“No.” I’d started to lie but changed my mind. There wasn’t any way to know whether saying I was Charles Atkinson would be a plus or a minus.
“I need to talk to Buddy,” Rosemary said.
“I guess you do.” He looked over his shoulder and then back at us. “I can’t see the clock from here. You got the time?”
I checked my watch. “It’s 11:25,” I said.
“He’s at the cemetery,” the man said.
The question must have been written on my forehead.
“It’s Grave Sunday,” he said.
“Where’s the cemetery?”
He stepped onto the porch. He pointed to the left, back toward town, the direction from which we’d come. “See that white spire?”
I said I did.
“That’s the Methodist church. The town graveyard’s behind it.”
“Thank you.” I watched him move back inside the house. “I didn’t get your name.”
“Bob James,” he said. “I’m Buddy’s brother.”
“Mr. James, was Billie Joe here?”
“That’s not my business. You talk to Buddy.”
He didn’t close the door. He waited. I took Rosemary’s arm and we walked to the car. After I closed the car door on the passenger side, I looked at the house. I had a flash of a gray stone face, his face, and then he closed the door.
“Odd time for it,” I said.
Rosemary slipped the serape over her head. “What?”
“Grave cleaning,” I said. “I thought that was usually in the spring.”
“I don’t think I know …”
“It’s a back country relic,” I said. “Must go back a hundred years or so. Most places it’s half picnic and half work. The church sets aside one Sunday a year and they clean up all the graves, their own and those of ones who don’t have family left.”
Beginning two blocks from the church all the spaces were taken. A good part of them were filled by pickup trucks. I had to go three blocks past the church before I found an opening large enough for my Ford. On the way around the front of the car I blew out a breath and watched it condense. It wasn’t a good day for a picnic.
From blocks away I could hear the chomp-chomp of the hoes and rakes. It was probably hard digging in that cold ground. The sound reminded me of something else: cool mornings, chopping cotton before the hot sun came out.
A path by the side of the church led to the cemetery. There were lights on in the basement of the church and I stopped and looked in. The small children were at Sunday school. That explained why there wasn’t any shouting, any noise of game-playing.
Past the back of the church, the graveyard spread out before us. It was level in front and rising, rolling, toward the back. A hundred or so men and women and teen-agers, in work clothes, labored over the graves. Hoes and rakes ripped the grass and weeds away. Wheelbarrows moved down the paths between the headstones. The piles of grass and weeds were scooped up on shovels and tamped into the barrows. It was work done in almost silence, grunting, low voices and the noise of the tools.
One man stood out at the edge of the swirl of movement. He was tall and white-haired and his jeans and denim shirt seemed store-bought new. That and the fact that he wore a black tie tagged him as the preacher.
“You see him?”
Rosemary shook her head. I took her arm and led her toward the tall man in the new work clothes. When we were a couple of steps away he turned toward us and smiled. I was right. He was the preacher. I knew that kindly smile. I think they taught it at Preacher College.
“Brother.” He held out his hand and I took it. “Sister.” He leaned past me and offered his hand to Rosemary. That over, he allowed himself a teasing remark. “I see you didn’t come dressed to work.”
“The truth is we’re from out of town. We’re looking for Buddy James.”
“Buddy?” He spun about slowly. “I know he’s here. I don’t see him now. I suppose he’s at the James plot.” He lifted his hand and pointed toward the high ground at th
e right rear of the cemetery. “Over there.”
I thanked him and took Rosemary’s elbow. As we moved away he invited us to stay for church. I said we might and then we passed through the oldest part of the graveyard. The headstones there were so weathered that I could hardly read them. I guessed that was because most of these early stones were cut from limestone.
Along the way people stopped working and stared at us. I think we were a curiosity of sorts. City people, I could almost hear them say. And then we were on the high ground and I felt the stiffness in Rosemary. I let my hand drop away.
“I see him,” she said.
“Where?”
“There.”
A man on his knees with his back to us. He was using one of those claw-like hand tools. The grave he was clearing appeared newer than the others nearby. It was still rounded, not sunken yet. He worked without wasted movement. Grass dug out and swept to the side, earth patted back in place.
He was wearing what might have been, at one time, the pants to a dark brown suit. The seat was shiny down to the knees and there were smears of white paint on the sides near the pockets. He wore an elbows-out blue sweater and a tan canvas rainhat. Shaggy brown hair damp-curled from under the hat.
Rosemary walked away from me. I waited. He didn’t notice her until he saw her shadow. He looked up and said, “Are you …?” and got to his feet. I had a look at his face. It was flushed, sweat pocked. I knew he had high blood pressure then and I had a feeling he’d almost fainted when he saw her.
“Yes, Buddy.”
“I think I was half expecting you.” He looked at me. “Is this your husband?”
“No.”
I stepped closer and watched him brush the dirt from his right hand. “I’m Jim Hardman.”
“Mr. Hardman is an ex-policeman,” Rosemary said. “He’s helping me look for Billie Joe.”
“Look for her?” His face darkened even more with a new rush of blood. “Isn’t she with you?”
“No, Buddy.”
“But I thought she’d …” He broke off. “I guess we’d better talk.”
They walked downhill toward the church. I remained behind long enough to read the headstone.